Pratham Books

Research shows learning to read in mother tongue languages reduces dropout rates and makes education engaging and meaningful for children yet UNESCO reports that 40% of the global population lack access to education in a language they know.
StoryWeaver, an initiative of Pratham Books, addresses this gap by providing open access to multilingual children's books. Rooted in openness, StoryWeaver operates under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license, ensuring its content can be freely read, translated, adapted, and shared. This philosophy empowers communities to create culturally relevant educational resources creating a multiplier effect and amplifying impact. This has led to a massive increase of local language books on the platform with 65000 books available in over 370 languages, which have been read over 200 million times. Of these, ~60% are in minority and indigenous languages, where books are scarce or non-existent. While the platform is digital, the books are available in multiple formats to overcome the issue of digital access and can be read online, offline or downloaded and printed.
StoryWeaver is built on Rails, a web application framework with its front-end on ReactJS. The third-party libraries we use are also open source. While all content on the platform is already under the Creative Commons license, in 2018 we open sourced our code under the MIT license. This was done with the intention to aid the ecosystem of reading platforms to repurpose investments to unlock access to digital storybooks. Room to Read repurposed our code base to create their own platform in Indonesia amplifying the child reach and impact. StoryWeaver is recognised by the Digital Public Goods Alliance as India’s first vetted Digital Public Good for early reading.